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With 393 million messages, Sina Weibo logs over twice as many Olympics posts as Twitter

Sina Weibo was by far the most popular Chinese micro-blogging service during the Olympics, recording twice as many Olympics-related messages during the games as Twitter did.

According to an infographic from Sina, Weibo users sent a total of 393 million messages about the Olympics, as of August 13 at 9am. Earlier statistics also released by the company showed that 119 million messages were sent during the opening ceremony alone.

By comparison, Twitter announced that 150 million Olympics-related tweets were sent on its service during the games. The opening ceremony resulted in 9.66 million tweets. The comparison isn’t likely to be one-to-one, as it’s not clear whether Sina counted reposts and comments as separate messages.

Meanwhile, Sina Tech reports (translation) that new data from Hitwise compares the four top Twitter-like competitors in China: Sina, Tencent, Sohu and Netease. It’s worth noting, though, that the figures only include PC traffic, so they don’t offer a complete picture of the micro-blog space. As of June 2012, just 32 percent of traffic on Sina Weibo came from PC users.

Hitwise’s numbers show that Sina had the most visitors to its Weibo service over the 17 days of the Olympics with 310 million visits. Tencent came in a distant second with 200 million, followed by Sohu with 120 million and Netease with 40 million.

A measure of “residence time,” presumably the amount of time that users spent on the site, showed Sina had an even more impressive lead with a 70.6 percent share. Sohu took second with 14.2 percent, then Tencent with 13.1 percent and Netease with just 2 percent.